When I Was Old: A Time-Travel Story About Leaving the Past Alone

Most of the time-travel ideas in this drawer are about fixing something big: a broken timeline, a war, the invention of time travel itself. When I Was Old is smaller and sadder. It's one man and his own life, and his inability to leave it alone.

The premise

An older man can travel into his own past. At first he only watches the key moments of his younger life. He's convinced that if he just stepped in, he could make that life better.

So he steps in. Small things first. He leaves money where his younger self will find it. He heads off fights before they happen. And the whole time he's losing his grip on the present he actually lives in.

On one of those trips he meets a woman, and they fall in love. She's kind and free-spirited and very much in the present, and she tells him plainly to stop rewriting history and live in the moment. He has to choose between staying with her in the past and going back to his own time.

Then he learns what his meddling has actually been doing, and that it has cost him the woman he loves. The last part of the book belongs to someone new: a kind woman who finds him at his lowest and helps him accept that a life can't be rewritten.

The line it's named for

There's one line in the notes, and it's the reason the book has its title:

"That was a different me, that was when I was old."

It's the moment he accepts his mistakes, stops dwelling on the past and chooses to live for today.

How the time travel works

It doesn't, on purpose. The notes are firm that the mechanism stays unexplained, dreamlike rather than technical, so the attention stays on what it does to him. The only rule that matters is that observation slides into interference, and interference ripples.

The influences say a lot about the tone: The Time Traveler's Wife for the emotional cost, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for regret and memory, The Butterfly Effect for small changes with big consequences, and Arrival for what nonlinear time does to a relationship. The mood note is "melancholic and reflective, with moments of hope."

Where it stands

It's early. The plot, characters, notes and references were written in the second half of 2024, and the bible from this June lays it out as a prologue, five chapters and an epilogue in four movements: observing, meddling and falling in love, the realization, and the recovery.

None of the four main characters has a name yet. They're "the older traveler", "the younger traveler", "the love interest" and "the kind woman". They'll all need names before a first page.

Note

This one has more in common with Continue? than it looks. Both are about someone who keeps redoing his life and has to learn to stop. One is a comedy and one is not.

Update: this one has a working page now, and the chapters will show up there as I write them: When I Was Old.